“B2B marketing campaigns are different than B2C marketing campaigns.”
As a B2B marketer, you must have heard this a million times.
But the fact is, the essence of marketing in both kinds of businesses remains the same – is your target audience aware of your existence? Are you able to get them interested in your company?
All your marketing campaigns revolve around answering the above questions. Every company, be it B2B or B2C, is trying to create a space for themselves in their target market. As a marketer, your entire existence goes into trying to make your company stand out.
The thing is, how do you know that while concentrating on creating a space that is different from your competitors, you are not making some seemingly trivial but grave mistakes? We are talking about some common mistakes that many marketers, especially B2B marketers, make.
You must know about these and avoid them to help the ROI of your marketing campaigns reach sky-high.
So, without any further ado, let us proceed to discuss 5 of the most common mistakes associated with B2B marketing campaigns and ways you can avoid making them.
Mistake 1: Ignoring Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
So, you have a website for your business. As a marketer, you know the importance of having an online presence.
But if you think that just having a website is enough to create an online presence for your company, you cannot be more mistaken.
Why?
According to research, 53% of your website traffic comes from organic search.
Why should you bother about organic search?
- 61% of B2B purchasers begin the process of purchasing with a web search.
- 77% of decision-makers of B2B companies say that they will only contact a salesperson when they are first done with their online research.
- Around 99% of online searchers will visit the websites that appear on the first search engine result page.
- B2B companies that regularly update relevant content on their website generate around 67% more leads monthly.
The above-given stats are why you should bother about organic search and SEO.
The era of sticking to just traditional marketing for B2B lead generation is long gone. Now, you need to have a solid online presence to reach your target audience, which is achieved only through proper SEO.
With most of the businesses around the globe finding a spot in the internet domain, SEO has become increasingly necessary for marketers to take their businesses forward. Just like for B2C, it has also become a crucial B2B marketing tool.
RELATED: B2B SEO Strategy: 15 Best Practices for Creating Your B2B SEO Strategy
What should you do?
The most important step is to create and post content regularly on your website. But not just any content. It has to be informative, relevant, and add value to your target audience. Also, using the right keywords is crucial.
The next step is refining your web pages and content with relevant keywords and phrases. Some other ways for incorporating SEO into your website are by streamlining meta descriptions and title tags, page optimizations through improved site load time, utilizing responsive designs, getting authentic backlinks, and so on.
The more varying kinds of SEO strategies you utilize, the better the chances are for your website to be featured on the first search engine results page, therefore improving visibility.
SEO, therefore, plays an important role as an online marketing tool. The more visibility and better rank you have in the internet domain, the more are the chances of you being recognized as a trustworthy company. It also helps increase your brand awareness because of better online engagements.
Read B2B SEO Strategies: How to Rank and Generate Organic Sales in 2021 for tips and tricks to improve your online presence through effective SEO strategies.
Mistake 2: Using Jargon
“Any observable, cumulative paradigm shift enclosed within ecosystems of crucial nature often presents potentially antagonistic quandaries or provide a route to arduous predicaments which can tie synergies into a Gordian knot.”
While the statement mentioned above sounds impressive and bombastic, it would hardly make any sense to most people. This is an example of jargon, which by definition means language difficult to comprehend.
Granted, as a B2B marketer, your target audience is the people who are usually the decision-makers of a company, namely, the middle and higher management. This is exactly why they do not have the time to go through texts that are difficult to understand.
While jargon sounds impressive and is often considered a display of authoritative power, the excessive use of jargon in your content can cause you to lose valuable traffic from your website.
While jargon sounds impressive and is often considered a display of authoritative power, the excessive use of jargon in your content can cause you to lose valuable traffic from your website. Click To TweetIndeed, your content might be super useful and filled with treasured information, but whoever has the time and patience to get past the flowery, complex language?
So, do not risk your B2B marketing campaign just over some ornate use of language. It might establish you as someone knowledgeable, but it will also make your content unnecessary unreadable, and undecipherable.
RELATED: Cutting Through the Jargon: 3 Ways to Humanize Your B2B Messaging
What should you do?
A good way of improving your B2B marketing and online presenting skills without using far too much jargon is preparing for what you post beforehand.
The following steps can be helpful:
- It will be helpful to have a content planner, which you can update quarterly, or yearly.
- Get the posts ready at least three weeks before the date when you wish to post them.
- Go through the content repeatedly. If possible, get some people who belong to the lower management to read the post. If they find it simple enough to understand, you know the post is good to go.
- Limited use of uniquely or lesser-used terms might look good for the sake of posting, but do not overuse them.
- The same is applicable for unnecessarily long posts with needless repetitions. It will be tedious for your readers to go through and might cause them to lose their attention.
The above steps will allow you to get rid of unnecessary jargons, improve your online presence, and help you attract a wide range of audiences. Indeed, your target audience belongs to the middle or higher management. But you never know who might come across your post, find it insightful, and recommend your business to a potential client.
The risks of creating posts that are complicated to read are never too less and can cause your B2B marketing campaign to end up like a “Gordian Knot“. So, it is popularly advised for B2B Marketers to post and virtually promote their product in the simplest language possible while making it interesting to read and follow.
Mistake 3: Costly Pay-Per-Click (PPC) B2B Marketing Campaigns
If you are a regular internet surfer, you are bound to have come across pay-per-click campaigns. While going through a webpage, you must have seen sponsored advertisements flashing across your screen. These are PPC campaigns and they are an excellent way of raising your website’s internet traffic, with a bit of help from virtual platforms like Google Adwords.
These PPC B2B marketing campaigns are essentially online ads that redirect a user to your website every time they are clicked. PPC campaigns reach a targeted audience much like SEOs, i.e., when the user searches for something related to your promoted product, they will see your PPC ads. In recent years, PPC has emerged as an important B2B Marketing strategy that just cannot be neglected.
However, PPC campaigns are costly and may burn a hole through your pocket if left unchecked. As mentioned above, these B2B marketing campaign strategies charge a fee every time someone clicks on them. If most of these visitors leave without making a purchase, simply put, your investment is wasted.
Indeed, the PPC fee is nominal if you consider it one click at a time. But when the clicks are compounded over a period, they add up to lump-sum amounts, enough to burn through the budget of smaller businesses quickly.
What should you do?
The use of PPC marketing must be supervised and optimized. The best way to do so is to create a marketing funnel first and then targeting your PPC campaigns to the users who are most likely to convert.
For example, people who search intending to make a purchase are most likely to click on the ads that show them exactly what they are looking for because such ads are most relevant to them.
So, the best way to make the most of your PPC campaigns and drive better ROI for your company is to utilize the information given above. Create PPC campaigns with direct purchasing keywords, meaning keywords that people use when they intend to buy your product.
The baseline is don’t blindly follow the trend, do what is best for your company. Yes, PPC will bring in business, which is why it is so immensely popular with B2B marketers. But understand how it can serve you best to make the most of it.
RELATED– B2B PPC: How to Use Paid Search to Drive Business Leads and Revenue
Mistake 4: Not Using Social Media
According to research, 75% of B2B purchasers browse through social media before making a decision. Do you still think social media marketing is just for B2C businesses?
Oftentimes B2B marketers ignore social media in favor of other types of marketing channels, not realizing that social media can be a powerful tool in driving brand recognition, increasing visibility, and establishing your business as an industry leader.
Not to mention, professional social media platforms such as LinkedIn can help you to connect with your prospects and create an impression on them. Videos and podcasts posted on a platform like YouTube can also be great traffic pulling tools that can generate valuable leads as well.
What should you do?
Have a strong social media strategy in place. According to Statista, B2B marketers have found LinkedIn to be the most effective social media platform, followed by Twitter and YouTube.
However, it doesn’t mean that you should ignore the other channels. Facebook and Instagram can prove to be quite great channels for B2B marketing as well.
It all depends on where your target audience spends most of their time and the kind of product or service you are offering.
The gist of the matter is as a B2B marketer, it would be one of the biggest mistakes to avoid social media for your B2B marketing campaigns.
Read Why B2B Business Should Use Social Media Marketing for more information on the benefits and how you can strategize your social media campaigns.
Mistake 5: Lack of B2B Marketing Campaign Tests
Though often considered unnecessary, testing your campaign often leads to benefits that you would not experience otherwise.
Yes, it can be time-consuming or might often seem like a waste of resources. However, testing a campaign can provide invaluable insights and observations of your B2B marketing campaigns that can lead to long-term results.
The outcomes of testing your marketing campaigns may not be reflected as direct monetary profits, but they are crucial for calibrating your marketing strategies in accordance with the market and the requirements of your target audience.
In fact, correcting all the above-mentioned mistakes will amount to nothing if you don’t test your campaigns afterward to see if they made any difference at all.
In terms of testing your online marketing campaigns, the following are the areas you should review continuously:
- Keywords – which are the ones bringing in the most traffic? You should create more content using these keywords.
- Website design and accessibility – what is the bounce rate, meaning are people staying on your website, or are they turning away after visiting a single page? Your website design may be complex or the pages might be taking too long to load.
- Social media posts and engagements – which are the posts that are getting the most engagements? You should post similar content more.
- Consumer reviews, suggestions, and helpline – you should try and reply to your customers when they leave a review or a suggestion because it shows that you are interested in what they have to say. Also, make it a point to work on the feedbacks.
- Email marketing – are there new subscribers every month? If more people are unsubscribing from your email list than subscribing, you have to buckle up your email marketing strategies.
B2B marketing campaign tests can help you avoid spending time working on unnecessary strategies and resource expenditures for mediocre or less-than-expected results.
What should you do?
Conduct regular B2B marketing campaign tests that can help you to understand the relevance of what you post online, preferences and interest of your target audience, and more.
After all, data never lies. The best way to understand whether an online marketing campaign is profitable or not is to gather evidence of how much traffic it attracted, how much engagement it garnered, and how many leads it helped to generate.
So, what is the best way to answer the above questions, gather fool-proof data, and test whether your marketing campaigns are working or not? You probably already know the answer, analytics!
There are numerous analytics tools available online which you can use to test out your various marketing campaigns. The important thing is to find the tools that are best for your industry and business and utilize them to better your marketing strategies.
Of course, you will be using Google Analytics and social media analytics, but they are not enough to give you insight into all your marketing campaigns.
Building a top-notch online presence from scratch for a B2B business has never been an easy feat. The points we have discussed so far are crucial for attracting prospects to your business, and B2B marketing campaign tests are crucial for you to attain that goal. Since only consistent testing and analysis of your marketing campaigns can let you know what is working for your business and which part of your campaigns you need to prune out.
Learn from Your Mistakes to Improve Your B2B Marketing Campaigns
Other than the five common mistakes we discussed here, there are other mistakes you should steer clear of. This includes ignoring proper call-to-action on your landing pages, ignoring strategizing proper email marketing campaigns, non-alignment of your sales and marketing team goals, and not researching your target audience. These mistakes might sound simple, but they hold you back from reaching your desired goal and are even capable of slowing down your business growth if left unchecked.
However, now that you are aware of these mistakes, you can easily avoid them, making your marketing campaigns a success. So, it’s time to put this knowledge to action and plan for the most successful online marketing campaign for your B2B business. All the best!
Contact us at OneIMS for all your B2B marketing needs.
